Prioritized support of different traffic classes in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11e is an amendment to the popular 802.11 standard that defines quality of service mechanisms to support sensitive applications, such as voice and video. An important component of these mechanisms is the traffic scheduler, an entity that decides on the channel allocation among different stations. This paper proposes a scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.11e, referred to as P-ARROW (Prioritized and Adaptive Resource Reservation over Wireless), that effectively handles multimedia traffic by utilizing the formal specification of each traffic stream. Using a single “priority factor” parameter, the scheduling can vary between strict prioritization and purely deadline-driven allocation. Performance evaluation results extracted from an advanced simulation model, show that P-ARROW is very efficient in supporting the desired level of service differentiation and prioritization among different traffic classes.